On God, Faith and love

- Jan 6, 2018 -

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This post is dedicated to R., a person who briefly entered in my life and then (too) quickly exited it. Leaving a huge void inside me. R. taught me about Love, not the one between man and woman or brother and sister, but the universal love. Something that I missed, or avoided, in my life for long time. R. gave me new hopes for a better World, for a better me and helped me to see what is our real purpose in life. Give love and love life, unconditionally.

We all need to believe in something. We need faith.

Since the beginning humans have always felt the need to believe in something bigger, something that cannot be seen but that gave them faith, hopes, peace of mind.

Some call it God, other Allah, other Buddha. For some were multiple Gods but it doesn’t matter who or what it is.

What really matters is that we always felt the need to believe. Even atheist believe, they believe in science. We all need to believe in something that helps us to understand the biggest mistery of human beings, the mistery of life.

I grew up in a catholic family, but I have been agnostic since long time. To be exactly since the moment my father died. I remember his last moments of life, when he felt it was the moment he immediately started looking for the sacred images next to his desk, to help him approach the death with peace. Those were terrifying moment for me, something that, obviously I will never forget.

Before this episode of my life, I was religious. I needed to pray our christian God to save my father. Once I realised he would not be saved I prayed so much that he would not die during my birthday. Instead it happened, he died the 24th of September 1993, when it was my 16th birthday.

While I saw my dad looking for those sacred images, and then saw him die. I felt so much hate, so much that I threw all the images on the floor, screaming and crying that I would never believe again.

I became agnostic, and believed only in what I could see, what I could feel and prove to my eyes that was true. I was driven by hate and anger.

My sister saw her beloved husband fighting for his life on a hospital bed for 2 long months, waiting for a transplant that seemed to never arrive. I was with her, I was angry, but she was calm. “I need to believe” she kept telling me. On the last day the transplant arrived, my brother in law survived.

But then her son got sick, he also fought for his life for a month in the hospital, again I was full of anger, while she kept believing and having faith in God. Again our little hero survived. It was hard but he survived and now he can even practice his favorite sport, soccer.

I kept wondering how my sister could resist to this pain, how my mum did all that years with my father, how they could not lose faith in this so-called God, how they could love someone (or something) who gave them so much suffering.

In the last months I went trough a very hard inner pain, so immense that in certain moments I felt I would not make it. Until one day I understood: it is not about believing in a God or a religion. Is about love, is about loving life. These women taught me the best lessons I could learn in my life. As Marianne Williamson pointed out in her book “Return to love”,

without love we live in Hell, but with love we live in Heaven.

I lived in Hell for so long that I totally forgot what loving meant.

Love is what drives our lives, love is what gives our life a meaning. Living our life full of love means living a meaningful, beautiful life.

I decided to surrender my life to Love and I started looking for the inner peace. I cannot feel anger or hate again. I try to put my past aside. I lived for so many years replacing love, faith and respect with fear, hate and anger … with a void that now, finally, I understand what it was.

Thanks to meditation and the “God of my heart”, I am finding, slowly, my inner peace. I can now feel love again. Is a strange feeling, impossible to describe but easy to feel, it just takes one simple thing: Open your heart and fill it with Love.

So yes I believe again, because in the end everyone of us, in one way or another, needs to believe. Either if is a God, a religion or, like me, just the God of my heart.

I cannot change the past, I cannot correct the mistakes I did, but at least I can look to the future with a heart full of love, believing that this world and this life are beautiful. And willing to fully living every moment of it.